"Hayeck is dead. But who killed him and how?" This would be as good a
way as any to describe the stakes of this thread. Because Friedrich
von Hayeck (the economist/philosopher behind the Thatcher/Reagan
program) seems to have had his day in the sun. His exaltation of
individual entrepreneurship and unfettered markets emerged in the
eighties as the effective heritage of the anti-bureaucratic revolt of
the sixties. The result was to call a halt to the development of the
Keynesian welfare-state, and to launch the dynamics of transnational
financial speculation, leading ultimately to what I call
"transnational state capitalism," where the state mainly serves
transnational capitals and corporations. Now those dynamics have in
turn entered into crisis, as I've pointed out here before, with my
recent contributions "Deflation, anyone?" and "The End of Neoliberal
Globalization." The problem is, it has not yet been possible to
locate any current of thinking or acting capable of articulating new
values, and above all a new conception of social interaction that can
rise to the challenges that we are now looking squarely in the eye,
as the Hayeckian ideology of "neoliberal" globalization collapses and
we must consider the cruder realities of a world capitalism
articulated by rivalries between three major continental blocs
(NAFTA, EU, and in the near future, China/ASEAN). The question is
whether it is possible to imagine, encourage, and develop any
response to these crude rivalries, from the bottom up, using the
productive capacities and agency that we situated individuals may
have in our lives.
What I tried to broach in the paper at the origin of this little
thread was the possibility of extending an existing, rather pragmatic
line of thinking about co-operative production. Everyone involved
with the Internet knows the paradigm of cooperative software
production associated with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvald. Most
everyone has become aware that there is an analogy, and indeed a
certain family resemblance, between this cooperative paradigm and the
kinds of social protocols that preside over the production and
circulation of academic knowledge. In both cases, the motivation for
what is essentially informational or cultural production is detached
from the commodity form (stuff you sell or pay for, with someone
gaining a profit). The motivation derives rather from what is quite
vaguely defined as "recognition," "reputation," "idealism," etc.
(each of these being somewhat different). In his excellent paper,
"Coase's Penguin: Linux and The Nature of the Firm," Yochai Benkler
explains, not the motivation, but the technical and legal
preconditions for cooperative informational and cultural production.
The technical considerations are basically: telematically interlinked
personal computers. The legal precondition is basically: that
information be treated as what it arguably is, a "non-rivalrous
good," i.e. a resource that can't run out, that can't be destroyed in
the using, and that therefore cannot be treated as an ownable
commodity. Benkler's conclusion is that networked informational and
cultural production obeys neither the constraints of a firm (with a
bureaucratic organization), nor the price signals given by a market
("buy" and "sell" are irrelevant to non-rivalrous goods). So Benkler
is talking about a form of production which is at once
non-bureaucratic and, yes, non-capitalist, i.e. divorced from that
complex and changeable human institution which transnational state
capitalism now dominates almost entirely: the market.
Given all that, my idea was twofold. First, to point out that there
existed another important and quite visible realm of cooperative
production, involving both aesthetic display and academic-type
reasoning: this is the realm of the new political dissent, combining
carnavalesque performance with political-economic critique. Second, I
wanted to stress what Benkler refers to only vaguely in a footnote:
namely, that the motivations for this kind of cooperative practice
are specifically anti-capitalist, and indeed, anti-state-capitalist,
insofar as they lead people to use cooperative production techniques
as a way of explicitly refusing the social norms of neoliberal
society. These norms tend at once to individualize people in
conformity to market ideology, and to make those highly
individualized people nonetheless amenable to bureaucratic control
systems. Such individualized conformity is the characteristic feature
of what I call "the flexible personality." I think it is basically
what the counter-globalization movement is against, at an everyday,
affective, motivational level.
The risk I took - and this is the weakest part of my argument - was
to use Marcel Mauss's notion, developed in his essay on The Gift,
that human societies are only sustainable through the operation of
complex reciprocities which cannot be accounted for in the logic and
language of markets as we know them under liberal (or neoliberal)
capitalism. The reason my argument is weak here, is that I do not
have a good sociologial or anthropological language to describe how
these reciprocities work in _our_ societies, today. Of course there's
a reason for that lack: these reciprocities are almost destroyed by
individualizing, flexibilizing capitalism, its firms and its markets.
What I do describe appears as a kind of weak, desperate resurgence of
older survival strategies. In the absence of a clear language
expressing the necessity of relationships not built on money and
which an adequately fulfilled contract does not abolish, the appeal
to the "gift economy" looks romantic (Ken Wark's word). Indeed, if
you want to contribute somehow to the general profile of "the one who
killed Hayeck," you have to go beyond anything "romantic." So some
conceptual help on this point would be much appreciated.
Unfortunately, the two main arguments that have been put up against
me so far are not to much use in this sense. Keith Hart wants to save
a market and invent new kinds of money to articulate cooperative
production: fine. I have no problem, as long as one agrees that the
present rules governing market transactions are highly inimical or
even fatal to cooperating, at least to cooperating outside the
constraining framework of the contemporary firm. (The proof of that,
by the way, is the pressure that academic production itself is under,
particularly when the "publish or perish" imperative meets the
competitive framework installed by scientific journals managed for a
hefty profit. Here it would be necessary to talk more about the
spreading revolt which seeks to establish a new peer-review and
publication system via Internet). Beyond the distinction between
markets in the broad sense and specifically capitalist markets,
Keith's main point is that we should get working on the nitty-gritty
of actual cooperative production. Strangely, he doesn't see that I am
indeed talking about just that, as Benkler does too. But I'm talking
about it exactly in those realms of political confrontation where
there is an attempt to change the current, fatal rules imposed both
on markets and on public institutions that diverge in any way from
the norms of the competitive, profit-seeking firm.
Ken Wark's argument is quite different, in that it seeks to refine
the oppositionality I'm talking about down to a clear, specific
opposition that he places at the cutting edge of society's historical
development. This is the opposition between an information-owning
"vectorialist class" and a hacker resistance that treats information
as a non-rivalrous good ("free"). The logic is elegant, and it
clarifies a real conflict. But it doesn't fully explain the
resistance movements which actually exist, and give impetus to the
most interesting and promising aspects of real politics today. Much
of the resistance is in fact motivated by concern over ecological
issues, or in other words, over clearly rivalrous goods, whose
overuse destroys them. Water. Timber. Fish. The air itself. And so
on. A teleological Marxism allows you to think that such struggles
are subordinated to the main one at the cutting edge of production.
But observation shows that the real resistance generally procedes
from these "archaic" struggles, and only thence identifies the new
struggle over the freedom, or not, of information. I think that the
reason why the seemingly "outdated" issues come first is that they
are survivability issues. Live or die questions. And since they make
collective struggle against resource exploitation and then collective
management of resources into preconditions for surviving, they link
back to patterns of reciprocity (or of solidarity if you prefer)
which can actually inform and deepen the new kinds of cooperative
production, while pushing aside the harmful ideologies. Romantic? I'm
not sure. I think that human society necessarily works out its
collective survival strategies through a continuing reference to and
transformation of older patterns, or in other words, through a
cultural delay. You could even think of symbolic culture, with all
its rituals and enigmas and obscure aspects, as the cumberous gift of
a rather inefficient survival strategy that has to be "paid back" to
the following generations. A gift that can turn out to be full of
unrealized potential (like conceptual art in the age of Internet), or
that can turn out to be poisoned (as when a figure like Hayeck arises
from the rotting remains of older and more complex philosophies of
political liberalism). Hmm, it's all a bit complicated. Marx wasn't
very clear on that. But it was one of his weak points, I'd say.
best to all, Brian
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